What keeps me up at night, is the fate of Tim Smith from the Cardiacs. In my view possibly the closest pop music ever got to a Frank Zappa league songwriter. The man wrote crazy complicated , surreal and energetic music that admitedly is an aquired taste for people. Anyway, at the height of the bands fame, he was out one night at a sisters of mercy concert, and he got robbed for his wallet, and immediately had a massive heart attack. Rushed to hospital and clinically dead for 7 minutes before they revived him. This triggered a stroke of sorts. When he came too he was completely paralyzed down one side of his body, completely mute, and suffering massive pain signals up and down his body.He was fully cogniscient of what was going on around him ,the stroke did not affect his cognition, but unable to function at all. He never left hospital and stayed in limbo in hospital, for a decade before another heart attack kileld him. Ten years in hell. Fucking nightmare, and popular music lost one of its greatest songwriters.

Look after your tickers people. A full coronary heart attacks can be horrifying what it'll do to you, and thats if you survive it at all. And contemplate buying one of those Apple or Samsung watches that'll call an ambulance if you collapse.

The real annoying thing about the climate stuff, is in 2026 we have all the knowledge in place to actually solve this cursed problem. Its literally cheaper to get power out of renewables than almost any other means, and if we are prepared for a lead time and a bit of cost, we are quite capable of going nuclear too, if we sort out the red tape and bullshit. But 50% of the population vote for parties that campaign on "DIG BABY DIG! PHYSICS IN THE SKY IS A COMMUNIST PLOT" and the other 50% of the population are content to let their slightly less mouth foaming prefered party move deck chairs around on the titanic and not a knob of goatshit ever gets done.

Theres a bit of a magic trick with a lot of it.

These things are *realy* good at drudge work. Shitty reactjs sites. wordpress themes. The kind of stuff you give to the fresh recruit from university, whos still got enough vigor in him to tolerate working on mind numbing web shit all day. But you give it a hard problem, race conditions in a multithreaded code, cache chaos, or worse mashing it all together and debugging memory leaks in a cached multithreaded system across multiple language translation layers in a system designed by insane architecture astronauts on meth, and they fall to pieces. I mean, its impressive, but its not going to be replacing senior devs anytime soon.

Probably one of the most brilliant people of the century who we lost due to bigotry.

Sadly, one of so many. Recently found out my best friend in highschool had suicided likely because he had been outed as gay. All I can think of is he should have told me, I'd have supported him, he's hadly the only gay friend I ever had. And in retrospect it should have been bleedingly obvious, the man would practically run from any woman who showed him affection, and he was pretty dandy. Singing in a hair metal band and being kinda..... camp with all the frizzed hair and leather tassles and shit. Think motley crue or poison or whatever. But it was the 1980s and people where pretty brutal to young gay people back then.

Even if I go back to the 1990s and boxed retail software, you were never actually buying the software, your purchase was for the license to use it.
The real issue here is the gamers being sold software whose functionality is tied to third-party servers and denied first sale doctrine (the ability to transfer/resell their license if they want to someone else).

Thats always been a gross simplification of the rights generally involved with a software sale. While yes, technically its a license to use software, rather than the software itself, license sales have always had a series of expectations associated with them in law, common law and in user expectations. And those expectations matter in a courtroom.

Most of the world consumer law is very clear that if you give a license to use something, and its sold as "buy" rather than "rent" or "time limited" , its not revokable and its subject to the same sort of consumer protection laws buying a toaster or a car has. Most importantly that it remains fit for purpose for the natural lifetime of the product, and that term "lifetime" is absolutely not "until we tire of letting you use that thing you paid for" but rather "How long would a reasonable consumer believe they can use this before its basically bitrot". To simplify that, assume it means "as long as the physical software is capable of running without a rewrite" and NOT "until we send the kill-command to the DRM".

The tension here is that software is attempting to move to a service model whilst trying to retain the language of a product model. You dont purchase a pool cleaning man, you hire a pool cleaning man. Well, unless your in a southern state during a terrible time in history, I suppose.

And thats where cases like this the complainant stands a good chance of winning. Because if California law has strong protections (A lot of america *doesnt* , but europe* and australia but apparently not canada for reasons that are mystifying to me, have strong protections) then if it can be shown that at the point of purchase it was not made clear that this product was time limited or was going to be made unavailable to people who purchased it, then the complainants have a strong case for deceptive advertising.

* I am aware europe just voted down a 'stop killing games' law. I am surprised by that, because honestly, it should have been the default anyway. I smell the acrid stench of industry lobbyists foul deeds

HPE is not HP. Do not confuse them. HPE was spun off into a completely separate company ages ago and has no business relationship or ownership relationship (different stock tickers etc) , decades ago.

The thing is , Switzerland was always stuffed to the gills with germans, french and italians. I've never met a more multilingual people than the swiss.

Its always the same kicking post too, "It must be the immigrants". I had someone ranting to me the other day about how she didnt feel safe anymore and crime was thru the roof blah blah no go zones, No matter what statistics I showed her that in fact crime had consistently been dropping over 20 years and the days while certain parts of town in the 1970s and 1980s you where taking your life into your own hands entering, in 2026 those areas are mostly gentrified luxury appartments, and so on, she just wouldnt believe any of it, and its all "The immigrants are making crime!" (despite the fact that consistently immigrants are significantly lower in representation in crime stats than locally born folks).

Some people just refuse to think it over. In the end I really had to just disengage from the conversation because any data that disproves her paranoia she just takes it as evidence that people are lying using maths or something. I honestly don't how do you get someones brain unstuck from a rut like that? At a certain point, its just exasperating their crazy to even try.

Yes, I'm sure humanity's 21st century understanding of physics, despite things like the crisis in cosmology, dark matter, US military footage, etc, is fully accurate and is the absolute limit of reality's capabilities.

Its not a matter of thechnology, its a matter of physics. Assuming that humanity survive its currently self destructive trajectory and we are still around in a million years, the laws of physics will not magically change. The speed of light will still be a hard limit, both for us, and for anybody else in the universe.

The crisis in cosmology and dark matter have no bearing on this. Both the actual composition of dark matter , nor the correct value for the cosmological constant are completely independent variables to the speed of light. The resolution of these issues will not change the fact that the speed of light places hard limitations on the impossibility of casual visitation from distant stars.

Eh. Despite initial fears in 1990s about reproduction on the internet devaluing originals, copyright law and enforcement largely settled on the idea that that people posting images etc on forums and social media was largely harmless particularly if credit was given, but people using them commercially required payment. and that was an arangement that largely suited artists fine and largely ran as much on principle as legality until the AI bro's turned up and started just stealing art to transform into slop undercutting that whole agreement.

If it was a real currency, it losing value would generally be considered a positive. It means the sale of a good would earn more of the stuff. But this is where the bullshit hits the road. Its not a currency, nobody is using it to facilitate economic trade. Its just a shitty ponzi token. And the favor of the market has moved on from Dunning Krugerands to AI slop.

I wouldnt underestimate the complexity of an MMO. They are genuinely some of the most complicated software assemblages ever created, and usually involve teams of hundreds of people working for upwards of a decade just to get a beta out the door.

Creating a cloned server is a hell of an achievement.

Eh. I think he's a miserable c*** but oh well.

It'd be fun to be that rich, but it seems to do a number on peoples head to be that divorced from the grinding reality of regular folks.

If an invading army has been running genocidal ethnic cleansing on your own soil, then I'd argue that the gloves are off.

Imagine if , say, mexico invaded the united states (Hear me out, its a hypothetical). Would you be offended if the US responded with strikes on mexico? No you would not.

How is this different? Evil can not be tolerated. Ukraine has every right in the world to do whatever it takes, to defend her citizens, including retaliatory strikes.

Maybe? But it seems like its just more in line with the "californian landmarks" naming scheme , which they adopted after running out of big cats to name OSX releases after.